I'm late to the party... Sorry Bill... I am the person you were looking for. I have a 7 year old theater full of Strand gear and I desperately wish it was ETC. It all works fine, it's great equipment. But I can't get any support from Strand. My vision net software was abandoned and you have to run a windows XP computer to communicate with it. The console is great, but there's zero support for upgrades or repairs. Fortunately the good folks at Pathway (who own the Horizon software at the core of the Palette line) still care about their customers or I wouldn't even be able to get a new fixture profile. My dimmers are still rock solid, but I have seen the writing on the wall. The day they start having issues, I'm going to be in BIG trouble as Strand will definitely not be there to support me.
I'm curious about your issues as VN is still developed and supported. All of our commissioning agents use VN on more recent versions of Windows including Windows 10. The Palette software's fixture library is constantly updated as requests come in. Yes, it's done by the Pathway engineers but that's always been their choice. Customer support is always available to help if you need.